the internet

Last week, the online auction site The Auction Room crashed during the last half hour of bidding during a sale of works from the Middle East; these works included several from Charles Saatchi’s private collection. The close of the auction was postponed for nearly a week, until today. [The Telegraph]

In an attempt to improve journalists’ productivity, Newsweek introduces a dress code. No t-shirts, jeans, or sandals allowed. [New York Magazine]

China will introduce a plot of land where you can access some of the Internet. [Quartz]

Peter Eleey got a promotion: he is now Curator and Associate Director at MoMa PS1. [Gallerist]

Giving new meaning to the phrase “Live with art,” companies and institutions are moving into museums in Madrid as part of a sponsorship program designed to solicit support for the arts. This recent turn has occurred thanks to a reduction in government spending on the arts in Spain. [The New York Times]

Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa art installation has been deemed “an illegal roadside advertisement” by Texas state officials. No word yet on whether the art installation will need to be removed. [The Guardian]

A new way to buy a painting of money! bidding started yesterday for Conrad Bakker’s paintings depicting images of cowrie money shells auctioned on eBay. The paintings are priced according to the original asking price of the shells. [Tumblr via Cabinet Magazine]

Bad at Sports rounds up all the critical coverage of EXPO Chicago 2013. [Bad at Sports]

Tumblr and Phillips have changed the opening date of their digital auction, Paddles On, from September 23rd to October 1st. [Paddle8]

This is real: for $200 per family, the new DJ school for babies in Crown Heights will help your 0-3 year-old create “fun and funky samples”, and that’s not referring to diaper contents. Maybe they should partner with whoever taught this baby to shake it. [F’d In Park Slope and YouTube]

Is Occupy Museums as naive as its critics seem to think? I talk to those behind the movement to get a better sense of what they believe and where this is going. There’s a lot less to be skeptical about than many seem to believe.

Last week at AFC HQ we spent much time toiling away on a press release for an anonymous project we very much believe in. Remember the recent hoo-hah about Andres Serrano’s infamous photograph Piss Christ being destroyed in Paris? Well, we worked with a well-known artist to help get the word out about his response: a knowingly derivative, downloadable image of Christ in a different bottle of piss. This willfully anti-market, anti-collective profiteering from controversy, and anti-fundamentalist has produced a pseudo-immortal net based work: The Resurrection of Piss Christ. It begs your ability to download a file. The project launched yesterday, the day of Jesus Christ’s rising.

The readymade needs to die, just like the term “white cube.” Both have become catch-all terms that lack any specific reference to their original source. Discussions of the objet trouvé are relevant only if they refer to Duchamp's Fountain (1917) or things that, like Fountain, were mass-produced and then, with very little mediation on the artist's part, placed into an art context. My problems with using the term “readymade” (in gallery press-releases, art historical writing, blog posts, etcetera) after the jump.